Karen Knight knew this was the house for her as soon as she walked through the front door in 2010. For Knight, who considers herself more a fan of French country style, the 1968 A.D. Stenger ranch for sale in the Westlake Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas, wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. But the home’s efficient layout and tree-filled quarter-acre lot in one of her favorite neighborhoods proved to be a powerful selling point. Despite original dark finishes and small, compartmentalized rooms in the middle of the house, Knight put an offer on it without seeing any other properties. “I knew the potential of what we could do,” she says.
Knight hired Austin architect David Webber at the suggestion of Veronica Koltuniak, her friend and interior designer, who had seen his work throughout Austin. When she described the home to Webber, he realized he already knew it, and had even trick-or-treated there as a kid. “Having grown up in the neighborhood, I was very familiar with it and lived in a house designed by the same architect that did hers,” Webber says.
Over the next few years, the designers transformed the 1,500-square-foot ranch into a 3,000-square-foot residence to accommodate Knight and her three daughters. Updated finishes and a new A-frame tower preserve the sprit of the house but offer a thoroughly modern twist. “It was so fun to see David’s ginned-up version of a Stenger,” Koltuniak says.
Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: Karen Knight and her 3 teenage daughters
Location: Westlake Hills neighborhood of Austin, Texas, 4 miles from downtown
Size: 3,000 square feet (279 square meters); 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
Year built: Original home in 1968; addition in 2013
BEFORE: The original one-story exterior met at a gentle pitch at the front door, crowned by a somewhat unusual Japanese torii gate as a nod to the home’s Japanese influence. Adding to the Zen feel, you also would have crossed a water feature to reach the front door.
A.D. Stenger designed and built around 100 homes in the Austin area between the 1950s and 1990s, and like the designs of many home developers of the era, his houses featured sweeping rooflines; they were often single-story houses catering to Americans who wanted modern, affordable designs following World War II. The exteriors often used stone, pulled into the interiors, and featured clerestory windows and wood siding.
“After” photos by ArcherShot Photography except where noted
AFTER: They kept the front door in the same place but removed the covered front entry and moved the front walk off-center, breaking the symmetrical front. Webber built a new carport, and the new addition projects up from the back of the house, further enhancing the asymmetrical entry.
Knight and Webber wanted this home to be a warm, comfortable place for modern living, but they also wanted to preserve the essence of the home to pay homage to Stenger’s original design. “I wanted to do right by the house,” Knight says. They replaced the painted wood siding with stained locally sourced cedar that they then carried through the home’s interiors. “We really wanted to honor the woody materiality that was on the exterior of the original house, but we wanted to enrich it and make it more natural,” says Webber. A semitransparent Cabot stain on the exterior will keep the color pretty much as is; a low-VOC stain was used on the interior wood.
The design blends the living spaces of the house inside and outside. They left much of the house intact in terms of layout but tore down walls in the middle of the house to open it up. At the request of Knight, Webber replaced existing front sliding glass doors with floor-to-ceiling windows and added an extra window to bring more light into the house and eliminate an entrance.
BEFORE: The original kitchen sat in the home’s center, but its tall cabinets and inward-facing layout made it somewhat closed off from the rest of the downstairs activity. Knight wanted the kitchen to function more like the home’s hub. The kitchen was also pretty dark, with parquet flooring and dark windows.
AFTER: Webber started by knocking down walls and tall cabinets to open up the kitchen to the rest of the house. Now when Knight stands at the sink, she can see the front door of the house. “I’m constantly waving at the neighbors going by,” she says. When she stands at the stove at the new peninsula, she can look out to the backyard.
New finishes have reinvigorated the kitchen. Walnut laminate cabinets contrast with and complement the cedar walls and the pebbled floors. Orange
Formica countertops add color and a touch of period authenticity. (Knight coincidentally had orange laminate counters in her childhood home.) They also call attention to the kitchen as the great room’s focal point.
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